The Queer Limit of Black Memory

The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women’s literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book has taken years to complete and a village of support,
including the financial support of the University of
California, Santa Barbara Dissertation Fellowship in the
Department of Feminist Studies, University of California Presidential
Postdoctoral Fellowship, ...

The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) is a recent
structure that has emerged as a monument to Black memory.
Opened in San Francisco in December of 2005, the
museum is literally positioned between archives. Located near
Union Square, the museum stands across the street from the California
Historical Society, ...

Slavery is the African American “primal scene.”1. It is the condition
in which the memory of an African presence in the Americas
is born. True to the Freudian context of the term, it is under
these circumstances that Black sexuality in the Americas is first
constituted, creating the enduring memory of sexual subjugation. ...

In the above excerpt from Cherry Muhanji’s 1990 novel Her, a
gay male pimp, Monkey Dee, turns his attention to Kali—by
day a wife and mother, by night a cross-dressing “gay boy.”
Monkey Dee encounters Kali in Chesterfields, the local gay bar
where performers sing the blues, a range of sexualities reign, and
gender fluidity is the norm. ...

Chapter 3. “Mens Womens Some that is Both Some That is Neither”: Spiritual Epistemology and Queering the Black Rural South in the Work of Sharon Bridgforth

The opening lines of Sharon Bridgforth’s 1999 performance
novel love conjure/blues begins with an invitation to reremember
African American southern ancestors from the
early twentieth century.1 In Bridgforth’s work, the South is a locus
of Black queer life and the birthplace of Black queer identities and
desires. ...

When Jackie Kay’s first novel, Trumpet (1998), opens,
Joss Moody—a Black transman born in Scotland of a
white mother and an African father—is already dead.
His story is told through the remembrances of his wife, Millie,
and their adopted son, Colman, as well as others who had contact
with him during and even after his life. ...

Chapter 5. What Grace Was: Erotic Epistemologies and Diasporic Belonging in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here

This book began with an examination of pleasure in Black
lesbian neo-slave narratives as an imagined strategy of resistance
for enslaved women. In order to imagine pleasure in
the torment of slavery, the authors created irresolute, “undead”
characters to navigate the incongruous terrain of social death,
suffering, and momentary satisfaction. ...

In the opening of this volume I shared my desire for a resonance
of queerness in Black memory that I sought on the
metaphorical face of Africa as represented on the walls of the
Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. This text ends
as it began: with the ancestors, through an examination of the
registry of the dead. ...

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